There is a memorable line in The Bengal Files, a film by Vivek Ranjan Agnihotri I watched in Delhi last week. A police officer in Murshidabad tells an officer of the Central Bureau of Investigation who has been despatched from Delhi to investigate the case of a missing girl: “There are two Constitutions that operate here: one for the Hindus, and the other for the Muslims.”
To some people, it is lines such as this or the inflammatory speech advocating Pakistan by a leader of the Muslim League’s uniformed National Guard in August 1946 that make this successor to The Kashmir Files too harsh on delicate constitutions in West Bengal. The need to create safe zones for a snowflake generation bred by decades of uninterrupted secular governance may well be the reason why — purely unofficially — the custodians of law and order have discreetly whispered to the managers of cinema halls and shopping malls that it would be imprudent to expose impressionable minds to such a horror show. They could, in theory, take a chance, but the costs of
restoring damaged property would far exceed the brownie points secured for upholding lofty constitutional values.
At one level, the reason why The Bengal Files has been deemed contentious is because it deals with two very painful chapters of recent history: the horrific Calcutta killings of August 1946 and the pogrom in Noakhali in October-November of the same year. Both chapters shaped the course of events that led to the Partition of India. The Partition, it occasionally needs reminding, happened not merely in Punjab, Sind and the North-West Frontier Province, but in Bengal and Assam as well. The human suffering that resulted from Muhammad Ali Jinnah formally abandoning constitutionalism after the collapse of the Cabinet Mission proposals was triggered by the Muslim League’s Direct Action Day on August 16, 1946. Calcutta was the epicentre of the ‘ladke lenge Pakistan’ onslaught and the Noakhali pogrom was its bloody aftermath.
There is a folk memory of the ‘Great’ Calcutta Killings that has travelled across generations, marred in the process by politically expedient dilutions and embellishments. Unlike northern India where generously endowed Partition Museums in Amritsar and Delhi attempt to commemorate the experience of violence, dispossession and migration, there is nothing in Bengal to ensure that the memories of a troubled past are honoured.
Till recently, the conventional wisdom of the enlightened Bengali intelligentsia was that the story of the killings of 1946, whether in Calcutta or in Noakhali, was best treated as unspoken tragedies. The celebrated black-and-white films of the great masters of Bengali cinema dwelt at length on the profound sadness and even the loss of human dignity inside the camps and makeshift colonies of those uprooted from East Bengal. However, the artistic sensibilities of ‘progressive’ Bengal invariably stopped short of addressing a key question: why were the progenies of yesterday’s freedom fighters now refugees?
Some truly horrible things happened, for example, in Noakhali, some of which were recorded by the volunteers who accompanied Mahatma Gandhi on his peace mission. Should this generation know how mobs instigated by Gholam Sarwar Husseini, the radicalised son of a pir with political ambitions, attacked the house of the zamindar, Rajendra Lal Roychowdhury, while they were celebrating Lakshmi Puja and killed the whole family? Rajendrababu was ceremonially beheaded. Should they not be made aware of the abductions of Hindu women and the forcible conversions and accompanying humiliations? Or should these be left entirely to professional historians with their expertise in reducing human suffering to clever abstractions such as ‘subaltern assertion’?
Pushing the recent past into the realms of distant antiquity is an interesting exercise in psychological engineering. If the scope of The Bengal Files was, say, confined to a fictional account of the real-life events in Calcutta and Noakhali in 1946, Bengal’s thought police would have been more indulgent. Unfortunately, Agnihotri has brought the story too close to home by linking past horrors with terror in today’s Murshidabad. To cap it all, Agnihotri has morphed Gholam, the murderous villain of the Calcutta killings and the Noakhali pogrom, into the calculating and ruthless politician-don of today. The message is clear: the final chapter of what began in Calcutta in 1946 is still unfolding.
That there is a sharp political message running through The Bengal Files is undeniable. This is not the first time a filmmaker has chosen to make a political film, and neither will he be the last. From Garam Hava, which explored the existential dilemmas of a Muslim family in Uttar Pradesh after Partition, to Tamas, shown on Doordarshan in the late 1980s and centred on the Partition riots in Punjab, the tragedy of the country’s division has been addressed. That much of the literature reflected the ambivalence of Left-inclined activists — perhaps atoning for the comrades who supported Pakistan because it corresponded to Joseph Stalin’s thoughts on the ‘national question’— could well be coincidental.
Sending the message that a film is unwelcome in Bengal is a drastic step for any political dispensation. If Salman Rushdie’s abstruse The Satanic Verses was banned for fear of a religious mob, it would be instructive to identify which section would have taken offence to The Bengal Files.
Professional historians should have reason to feel offended. First, the film has not even a passing mention of the communists and trade unionists who, progressive chroniclers insist, played a seminal role in restoring communal amity. Whether bonhomie was in fact re-established is worth considering. Second, those who have been transformed into symbols of Hindu resistance, such as Gopal ‘Pantha’, were casualties of what was once described as the enormous condescension of history. In his work, Communal Riots in Bengal, 1905-47, Suranjan Das has only a perfunctory reference to the ‘dangerous’ Gopal who was active in Entally and to the fact that “On the Hindu side, strongmen of the bustees and organizers of akharas became the ‘local organisers’ of the riot.” If it hadn’t been for a stray interview by a BBC reporter, the legend of the legendary Pantha would have even lacked a voice.
However, historians and folklore both attach the lion’s share of the blame for initiating the carnage on the then prime minister of Bengal, H.S. Suhrawardy. In the film too, he comes through as a dapper mastermind of bloodshed, the man who facilitated the Muslim National Guard. The political legacy of the Urdu-speaking Suhrawardy is preserved in Bangladesh since he was the mentor of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. But is there a force in present-day West Bengal that continues to uphold, not Suhrawardy the man, but the political impulses that propelled the violent separatism?
There are certain awkward silences that also define the Indian reality. In its stark depiction of brutality, The Bengal Files has threatened to bring a subterranean current out into the open. Maybe this is why it could be worth viewing.